The present invention is directed to the fields of energy consumption management analysis and diagnostics, consumption management systems, electrical distribution grid demand management, and related fields.
Electricity consumers in recent years have been faced with rising energy costs and rising needs to address environmental and efficiency concerns. Energy consumption management systems have been developed with these needs in mind to reduce energy consumption during periods having higher electricity costs, to expand the availability of charging electrically-powered vehicles, to participate in demand response programs hosted by utilities, and to counteract the appearance of demand charges assessed by utilities, among other goals. These systems typically monitor the consumption of a site, generate a load profile for the site to visualize the consumption over time, and control the use of loads, energy storage, on-site generation, and other assets in order to manipulate the shape and size of the load profile of the site, thereby optimizing the consumption of electrical energy used to better meet the needs of consumers.
There are many obstacles to implementing a consumption management system. One such obstacle is an unknown load profile for a site. Because consumption management systems become significantly more cost effective and efficient when tightly integrated with the consumption needs of the site, load profiles are required in many cases in order to select a consumption management system that can best serve the needs of the customer. Unfortunately the most effective load profiles can take weeks, months, or even longer to generate by measuring consumption data at a site in real-time. Even after a load profile is generated, it may not give a clear picture as to how to best manage the consumption at the site. It may not be immediately apparent which devices or electrical systems at the site need to be controlled or mitigated in order to achieve the consumer's consumption management goals because all of the systems at the site are simultaneously measured and details about individual system management needs and suitability for curtailment, mitigation, and other practices are buried in the overall information gathered.
While many technologies have been developed for optimizing the usage of consumption management devices, they are difficult to match to unknown sites or for sites in which individual electrical systems have different needs. Therefore it is common that the provision and installation of management services and devices will have an unpredictable impact on the consumption of the site. This leads to inefficient expense of capital and other difficult up-front decisions about how to best approach energy consumption management for a particular site.